Mary E. Henry

(Ablex, 1993)

School Cultures is an anthropological as well as pedagogical reflection on the diverse purposes and goals toward which schooling might aim. According to Mary E. Henry, the practices, rituals and curricula found in schools always reflect a deeper layer of cultural values — "a particular lens or set of assumptions about social reality, nature, and human nature" (p. 13). She holds that educators need to examine these underlying meanings more closely in choosing educational policy and methods, and in this book she provides a vantage point from which to observe and critically analyze the culture of the public schools. School Cultures presents her in-depth ethnographic research on two private schools — a traditional “academic elite” or “prep” school and a Waldorf school located in the same town. The practices in these schools are vastly different from each other (and from public schools) in important ways, because their underlying assumptions and values are different. The prep school represents a rational, formal, modernist worldview and epistemology, while the Waldorf school exemplifies a radical alternative — an aesthetic, personal, postmodern approach.

This book is illuminating in many respects. Henry demonstrates the relationship between the largely unconscious “culture” and the explicit policies and practices adopted by educators; she calls attention to the important effects that underlying assumptions have on school climate and students actual experience. She describes her research method in great detail and explains how this anthropological approach, appreciating culture as a holistic, symbolic, contextual and multiperspectival reality, is a powerful means of breaking through the policy surface to reach deeper levels of meaning.

In pedagogical terms, the book contrasts the “industrial” model of schooling that dominates public policy with the moral and spiritual values held by both private schools. More specifically, the book serves as a useful introduction to the philosophy of Waldorf education. There are very few descriptions of Rudolf Steiner’s fascinating educational theory outside the literature of the Waldorf movement itself, and Henry provides a sensitive, balanced perspective. She is especially impressed by the Waldorf school’s emphasis on “values other than those of the excessive competitiveness, materialism and violence that are seen to pervade American culture at large.... The school attempts to counteract the depersonalization, fragmentation, and alienation of humans from nature in an economy and consumer-driven culture, and hopes to affirm the spiritual in nature” (pp. 147, 149). The hope is that such alternative educational cultures will lead us to rethink the values underlying conventional schooling.

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